Chapter One
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âMY HEART IS A GRAVEâ
At last! Thereâs Nohant. Each homecoming offers some relief. This cold December brings a feeble hope that she might escape her inner demons. She is forty-five years old and world-weary.
Dark melancholy has enveloped these past two years. The utter failure of the revolution of â48, the mistakes, the socialistsâ collapse, her friends thrown in prison . . . and for what? An ultraconservative AssemblĂ©e and Louis-NapolĂ©on Bonaparteâs victory. Her political disillusions mingle with her personal sorrows, especially the rift between her and Solange, her daughter. How could she forgive her unacceptable behavior towards Chopin? The flirting, the gossip, the slander, the depraved life with her sculptor husband, Jean-Baptiste ClĂ©singer, this unpredictably violent creature that she herself had nonetheless welcomed into the family. Solange cuts her mother to the heart, incapable to love, and, herself, badly loved. What would George Sand be without her son, her Maurice, her cherished Bouli? A hollow soulless shell. He had been in Paris that spring, during the cholera epidemic. What if something had happened to him? She never would have survived.
So many deaths over the past few months. Her half-brother, Hippolyte, her childhood companion who finally succumbed to his alcoholism. Dearest Marie Dorval, her adorable, fragile, marvelous, and extreme Marie, her first adolescent love, Alfred de Vignyâs muse, Hernaniâs Doña Sol, Chatertonâs Kitty Bell, the romantic diva who told her âI want to be youâânow forgotten, fallen into quasi poverty, dead from despair when her grandson disappeared. And of course FrĂ©dĂ©ric Chopin, who died on October 17, devoured by consumption. He hadnât seen her since their brief meeting on a staircase one day in March of â48. That day he had told George Sand that Solange had given birth to a daughter, Jeanne, who passed away a few days later. George Sand never saw the child. She had barely finished her letter of congratulations when she found herself penning her condolences. The two letters reached her daughter on the same day.
Chopin had apparently wanted to see her before he died. Perhaps. But what good would it have done? During their nine years together she had been more mother than a lover, practically celibate since their return from Majorca. Life had been both chaotic and harmoniously balanced between Paris and Nohant, all at the measure of his possessive and hypersensitive genius. This incomparable musician was so troubled, so talented. He had taken Solangeâs side without hesitation. She felt no remorse over her break-up letter, nor for their abrupt separation. The events that followed convinced her she was right; but still, what a sad, sad failure. His death sent her spiraling into a deep depression.
She had played so many parts. From the young Aurore Dupin, running through the fields, to the rowdy and mystical pupil at the Augustinian Sisters boarding school; Baron Dudevantâs restless young wife, mother of two, and living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris; author of Indiana and LĂ©lia, dressing in menâs clothes, smoking menâs cigars, adopting a manâs name; the romantic muse of Alfred de Musset and FrĂ©dĂ©ric Chopin, her love affairs; the novelist admired by the likes of Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Delacroix, and Liszt; a liberated woman, always choosing her own lovers; the idealist faced with the harsh reality of the revolution. Such a romantic lifeâso brave, so taxing. What then remains? Rancor? Sorrow?
Any other woman would have accepted her fate and stayed by her husbandâs side. Young Aurore married Casimir Dudevant just to avoid the abhorrent suitors her mother forced upon her. A fresh-faced green girl of eighteen, horseback riding through the Berry countryside, studying philosophy passionatelyâoh, the hours she spent in her grandmotherâs library reading Aristotle, Leibniz, Rousseau, and others. She genuinely did believe she was happy with her husband. But soon, ennui settled in, eroding her courage, leaving her devoid of strength, with tears in her eyes. Casimir and Aurore had nothing in common save their republican beliefs. Everything that interested her bored or irritated him. He only found enjoyment in hunting, country living, drinking, and womenânot at all a mean man, but definitely not suited for her.
âI saw how you detested music,â she wrote to him in a twenty-two-page confession letter, âand how the very sound of the piano drove you away, so I put an end to it. You read only to oblige me, and no sooner had you read a few lines that your eyes closed and the book fell from your hands. As to our conversations on any subject, whether about literature, poetry, or ethics, most of the time you didnât know the authors of whom I spoke, or you dismissed my ideas as mere follyâfanatical and romantic. I simply stopped speaking.â
Even the birth of their son, Maurice, who was weaned too soon, failed to shake off her depression a year later. Their marriage collapsed. She soon found a kindred spirit in the romantic AurĂ©lien de SĂšzeâa platonic love. A lover followedâa real loverâher childhood friend StĂ©phane Ajasson de Grandsagne, âthe pretty Steny.â The birth of her daughter, Solange, didnât lift her depressionâa banal tale of a disappointed and bored wife. But contrary to the Madame Bovary about whom her future friend Gustave Flaubert would one day write, she saw exactly what she wanted and followed her dreams to the stars.
At twenty-six, she came to an arrangement with Casimirâshe would divide her time between Paris and Nohant. She settled in the capital with her new lover, Jules Sandeau, a nineteen-year-old law student with curly hair. They cowrote the novel Pink and White (Rose et Blanche) under the pseudonym J. Sand, and both worked as reporters for The Paris Journal (La Revue de Paris) and Le Figaro. Under the celebrated Henri Latoucheâs tight iron fist, Sand earned her journalistic stripes.
Everything changed in 1832 with the publication of her first novel, Indiana. Romantic and exotic, tempered by her bitter experience, Indiana shocked her readers. It spoke a modern language, breaking tradition with the popular historical novels of the day. A new romantic age awoke in the 1830s: Hugo with Hernani, Balzac with The Magic Skin (La Peau de chagrin), Stendhalâs The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir), ThĂ©ophile Gautierâs Young France (Jeunes-France), Mussetâs Venitian Nights (La Nuit vĂ©nitienne). Indiana was a womanâs triumph; a young woman of twenty-eight who led the charge against marriage and advocated freedom in love. Aurore Dudevant, nĂ©e Dupin, became a celebrity overnight under her new chosen name, George Sandâa masculine name with an English spelling. And not without a nod towards home: âGeorgeonâ happens to be the word for devil in the Berry dialect. But however lightly she handled her name change in Story of My Life (Histoire de ma vie), it was by no means a benign choice. By abandoning both her fatherâs and her husbandâs names, she created a whole new identity, that of George Sand, the author. She also broke from her female ancestry, the Aurores of her grandmother and great-grandmother, Marie-Aurore de Saxe and Aurore de Koenigsmark. She impudently feminized her male name. She made a true name for herself from a pseudonym and even passed it down to her children.
How many novels, how many plays, how many essays would follow Indiana? After Valentine came LĂ©lia, proclaiming a womanâs right to pleasure. Her readers thought the book to be a self-portrait, which hounded her for the rest of her life. Then came Jacques, A Travelerâs Letters (Lettres dâun voyageur), Mauprat, Spiridion, The Master Mosaic-Workers (Les MaĂźtres mosaĂŻstes), The Journeyman Joiner, Or, The Companion of the Tour de France (Le Compagnon du Tour de France), Horace, Winter in Majorca (Un hiver Ă Majorque), Consuelo, The Countess Von Rudolstadt (La Comtesse de Rudolstadt), Jeanne, The Miller of Angibault (Le Meunier dâAngibault), The Devilâs Pool (La Mare au diable), Lucrezia Floriani, and François the Waif (François le Champi), to name but a few works of over forty novels and novellas written between 1832 and 1848.
George Sand did not fully exist except within (and because of) fiction. Imagination was the only breath of fresh air in the dull weight of Auroreâs daily life. But her romantic inspiration didnât stop her from tackling issues closest to her heart: love and friendship, women and marriage, art and work, craftsmen and farmers, city folk and country folk, nature, mysticism, and secret societies. Her life was merely choices motivated by circumstances, meetings, and readings, by inspiration and conviction. George Sand, the pen flying across paper. Each book nipped at the heels of the one that came before, like each dream giving birth to the next. But writing was also how she earned her livingâthe iron shackles that chained her to the publishers of the journals she depended upon. They, in turn, compared her to the greatest writers. Balzac borrowed her personality for Camille Maupin in BĂ©atrix, and others followed suit. âWhat would French literature be to most European readers if not for George Sand and Balzac?â Stedhal wrote. In 1854, Nadar placed her first in his famous PanthĂ©on of 250 writers, where Victor Hugo seems to bow before a pedestal crowned with the bust of George Sand at the head of a long line of artists.
She was highly sought after, admired, criticized, and ridiculed. She had a rebellious nature, this woman who declared freedom from men. Yet George Sandâs freedom could not be defined by sex or gender any more than could her art. As soon as a discussion turned to literature, politics, or art, she used the masculine pronoun to refer to herself. She saw herself as an artist, not a female writer. Her contemporaries placed her in a league of her own. Flaubert would one day write to Turgenev about her, âYou must know her as I have known her to see all of the femininity of this great man, to see the tremendous emotion of her genius.â Her image in the 1832 lithographs became her signature look for years: a tailored frockcoat, a top hat fitted snugly over dark waves of hair, a cane or a Manila cigar resting in her hands.
Her creative activities did not limit this woman. Everything interested her; she studied natural science, medicine, and botany with passion, as well as painting, music, sewing, embroidery, gardening, and of course, her famous preserves. (She described them to her friend Jules NĂ©raud, âthe Malagasy,â in 1844: âYou must make them yourself, and you must not take your eyes off of them for an instant. Itâs just as serious as writing a novel.â) And she was generous to a fault, showing great concern for others. Men like Louis Michel, the republican lawyer; FĂ©licitĂ© Lamennais, an anticlerical Christian whose social mysticism she greatly admired and who fed her intellectual curiosity; Pierre Leroux, a socialist whom she helped to found The Independent Journal (La Revue indĂ©pendante), kept close contact with Sand. While she was accused of changing her philosophy based on who she talked to that day, she was crafting her own philosophy, like a bee gathering pollen from different flowers to make its own honey. However, the utopian within her was badly wounded by the bloody developments of June 1848 and the total failure of the Republicâone in which she could no longer recognize herself.
There wasnât a man in her life at that point, either. She, who had known such passion, so many fleeting lovers . . . What would the future hold for her?
The year 1849 is drawing to a close. Now she must take stock of her situation.
George Sand arrives by train in ChĂąteauroux, where the coachâthe bagottoire, as they say in Berryâcomes to pick her up. This cold December strings together the browns and grays of the countrysideâno cause for glad tidings. But then, itâs better than Paris, which she enjoys less and less. She may have felt a certain pleasure during her visit in February â48, but this time, three weeks were too long for her. And that was despite having stayed at the HĂŽtel de France on the rue dâAntin, in the theater district. Her play, adapted from the pages of François the Waif, completely won over the audience at the OdĂ©on (the book would not be published until the following year). What a triumph! Critical acclaim and a packed house. The love story between François, the abandoned child, and Madeleine, his adoptive mother; Marie Laurentâs moving interpretation; the painstaking care that Bocage brought to his interpretation of country-living in Berry; everything had been spot on. Satisfiedâsheâll be able to save herself from financial ruin after the debts Solange racked up. Still, nothing brings her true happiness.
While in Paris, she had paid visits to Sainte Chapelle and the minister of public instruction. Prosper MĂ©rmiĂ©e, her short-lived lover, had become inspector of historic monuments. She hoped he would grant historical status to the Nohant-Vic church. She had been at the center of Paris gossip when she broke off her liaisons with Carmenâs author. But that was such a long time ago . . . They had seen each other since, during an official dinner. She was âneither old nor young, and quite pretty, with striking dark eyes which she lowered when I looked at her. She looked better than she did twelve years ago,â2 MĂ©rmiĂ©e remembered. He brought her a cigar, which she gladly accepted. No words were exchanged between them. . . . In reality, a full fifteen years had rolled by since their affair, and the fledgling novelist had now become the most celebrated woman of the day.
Forty-five years old. Is that truly âneither old nor youngâ?
Alexis de Tocqueville crossed paths with George Sand for the first time at that same dinner in May â48, during the socialist enlistment. She had many friends there: Bakounine, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, and BarbĂšs. The conservative from Normandy described her as âa sort of political man.â Tocqueville loathed women who wrote, even more so when they spoke of revolution. He eyed her warily, but nevertheless found himself captivated by her conversation, her understanding of politics, and the accuracy of her predictions. âI did like her,â he wrote. âI found her to be a rather large woman, but who held herself admirably well. Her whole being seemed to be contained within her eyes; and the rest of her face, mere matter. What surprised me most of all was recognizing the natural allure of a great mind in this woman. There was such simplicity to her thoughts and her speech that perhaps she affected a bit of the same simplemindedness in her dress.â3
Feigned simplicity? Itâs far from Stendhalâs opinion, who met her on the way to Italy and was inspired to write that fashion must have been George Sandâs forte, she wore clothes so well! Although, he did add with some scorn that âher one flaw is her grand philosophy, her pretension.â If only women would stick to talking about clothes . . .
She did admittedly enjoy beautiful fabrics and colors. Her elegant dress could not escape the feminine eye of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The English poet was captivated by her gray serge dress and her stylish jacket, buttoned to her neck and trimmed with a collar and plain weave lawn sleeves, and thus pronounced her to be attired âwith great nicety.â4 George Sand had a look. It was her Spartan style that contrasted with the fashion of the day and was quite shocking for such a prominent woman. Mostly, she placed comfort above everything else, wanting the freedom to move from the parlor to the garden, from the kitchen to her desk. No percale, she specified to her half-sister, Caroline, who wanted to embroider sleeves for her: Muslin was âtoo much clothing for how active I am.â5 Neat, yes; fashionable, no. Unless the fashion was a refusal to pay much attention to her physical appearance.
EugĂšne D...